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Of the sixteen novels that John Steinbeck published before his death, in 1968, “East of Eden” was his favorite. “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this,” he said of the multigenerational epic, which follows two families in the author’s agrarian home town of Salinas, California. Published in 1952, the book is narrated by a fictionalized version of Steinbeck, who recounts the travails of the wealthy but miserable Trasks and the hardscrabble but lively Hamiltons, from the late nineteenth century to the First World War.

“East of Eden” is back on the cultural radar because of a buzzy new adaptation, on Netflix, that centers on Cathy Ames (played by Florence Pugh), an iron-willed woman who marries the hapless Adam Trask, gives birth to twins, and abandons them all as soon as she’s physically able, to join—and eventually run—a brothel. (When Adam asks her what he’s to do with two infants, she tells him to throw them down a well.) Suffice it to say, Cathy is the main reason to tune in.

I hope it’s not too blasphemous to declare that I preferred the miniseries to the book, despite finding the adaptation rather uneven. The show’s creator, Zoe Kazan, makes Cathy sympathetic, her villainy a product of the gendered violence of her era—something Steinbeck didn’t bother to do, as he considered her a born sociopath. I also loved Kazan’s elaboration on the character of Lee, Adam’s cerebral servant, who ends up raising Adam’s children while grappling with his inability to truly belong anywhere as a Chinese American in the early-twentieth-century United States.

But the novel is not without its advantages. Its chief edge over the series is its sense of historical sweep, conveyed via the book’s aging narrator, who seeks to impart how things used to be: how miraculous refrigerators initially felt, or how absurdly difficult it was to start the earliest automobiles. (My favorite chapter involves the narrator’s mother, Olive Hamilton, taking her first flight. She “did not believe” in aviation, he says—the Wright brothers had taken their inaugural ride less than two decades prior—but Olive gets on an airplane in spite of her terror, so as not to let her children down.) I didn’t always respond to the narrator’s tone of folksy garrulousness, but his love of his native soil—its seasons, its scents—gives the story a warmth that didn’t quite make the leap from page to screen. And, like all beloved multigenerational tales, the novel is wonderfully immersive—this one particularly so because it weaves in Steinbeck’s own family history.

For those who enjoy this kind of sweeping story, I recommend Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex,” another multigenerational saga that blends imagination and biography. Or, if “East of Eden” ’s backdrop of historical events appealed to you, try Min Jin Lee’s nearly century-spanning “Pachinko,” which explores the effects on one family of Japan’s colonization of Korea. Or read Isabel Allende’s magical-realist “The House of the Spirits,” which weaves together references to Chile’s political turmoil with complicated familial dynamics.

For more: read our critic Alexandra Schwartz on how the show unnecessarily softens Steinbeck’s most evil character.

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• In other adaptation news, Taika Waititi’s “Klara and the Sun,” in theatres on October 23rd and starring Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams, is based on a book by the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Also out on the 23rd is “A Talent for Murder,” in which Helen Mirren plays the writer Patricia Highsmith. It was originally a play called “Switzerland,” by Joanna Murray-Smith.
• The New Yorker contributing writer Lauren Michele Jackson has a book coming out on the 13th called “Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America,” about what the back carries—literally and metaphorically.
• Bonnie Garmus, who wrote “Lessons in Chemistry,” has a new book publishing, also on the 13th: “Peck and Peck.” Set in New York City, in 1982, its protagonist is a young man who gets a job at a prestigious poetry magazine where the twin editors in chief have a fiery rivalry.

P.S. Will Can Xue win the Nobel Prize in literature this year?

The New Yorker Documentary

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Tuva Björk’s short documentary opens with a private-security officer offering a litany of the weapons he has with him in his car, recounted with a pride that borders on glee. He has a small metal bar, best for breaking the bone around the eye socket; a knuckle-duster, worn down from use, attached to his key ring; a long, wiry strip to flick at someone from a distance which he says “draws blood” and works “like a whip.” The list culminates in a firearm that his partner carries. Private-security work is big business in Johannesburg—of the sixty-three million people who live in South Africa, almost three million work in private security. Björk’s film follows several of them as they guard residential areas and even patrol some public spaces. “Residents can just come on top of the ridge in a safe place, and then they can enjoy their conversations,” says one of the officers, armed and wearing a face covering in front of a fence topped with spikes and razor wire. One night on the ridge, security guards encounter some locals who have come up the mountain to pray, singing and swaying around a fire; the two groups’ interaction raises the question of how people achieve the feeling of security, and of who gets to feel truly safe.

If talk of a collapsing “international order” can feel like a distant abstraction, look to the Horn of Africa for a sense of its reality on the ground. The countries of this region—marked by rugged highlands, rift valleys, and arid coastal plains—have become troubling examples of a new era of global politics, where the strong dominate the weak, the institutions set up to forge peace are constantly failing, and the transactional economic interests of an array of outside powers overshadow the plight of civilians. In Ethiopia, a long-simmering conflict recently exploded into open war. Over the weekend, government troops and allied fighters pushed back the advances of an alliance of factions that are in rebellion against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s central government. By Monday, they were in control of Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray region and the seat of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which is one of the militias in the coalition that wants to oust Abiy. Weeks of violence, stretching from Addis Ababa, the capital, to areas in Ethiopia’s north and east, have led to dozens of reported casualties, internet and phone disruptions, and fears of a humanitarian crisis. Friction between the T.P.L.F., which had once dominated Ethiopian politics, and Abiy’s government underlay a civil war that began in 2020 and saw estimates of as many as six hundred thousand people killed and allegations of war crimes. An internationally brokered peace in 2022 failed to hold, amid various turf wars, paving the way for fresh trauma.

The situation is grim on its own, given the complexity of Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation and the home to dozens of different ethnic groups. But it’s made all the more fraught by the broader regional context. Shadowing the renewed fighting in Ethiopia is Sudan’s civil war next door. Abiy’s government has been reportedly involved with training troops belonging to the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary organization that controls swaths of western Sudan and has carried out numerous alleged atrocities and massacres of civilians during its protracted war with the Sudanese Armed Forces. Tigrayan fighters, meanwhile, have reportedly appeared alongside the Sudanese military in its battles against the R.S.F. In the earlier fighting over Tigray, Eritrean soldiers collaborated with their Ethiopian counterparts. Now Eritrea appears to be backing the Tigrayan rebels, and this prompted Ethiopia to expel ten Eritrean diplomats and to shutter its Embassy in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, last week; Eritrea, in turn, severed diplomatic relations. Last week, Ethiopia’s Army chief accused Egypt, Eritrea, and the Sudanese Armed Forces of fomenting the new insurgency. Their governments all issued denials, and, over the weekend, their leaders met in Egypt with the President of Somalia—who is also at odds with Abiy over the latter’s overtures to Somaliland, an autonomous self-declared republic that sits within Somalia’s internationally recognized borders. They issued a statement that aired shared grievances over Ethiopia’s designs on access to the Red Sea, which it had lost when Eritrea gained independence, in 1993, and its creation of a major dam on the Nile; the statement also rejected any recognition of or support for Somaliland. (Israel is the only U.N. member state to have established formal ties with the territory’s government.) On Monday, Abiy fired back, reiterating his view that Ethiopia must have “an outlet to the sea,” which it is now trying to regain through links with nearby Somaliland.

If you think this is complicated, hang on. Hovering in the background are the schemes and interests of a constellation of greater powers, including Gulf monarchies such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, as well as Turkey and Egypt. They are all players in an arc of conflict and opportunity that spans war-torn Libya on the Mediterranean Sea to war-torn Yemen on the Red Sea, fuelled by a scramble for control of strategic waterways and lucrative resources—oil, critical minerals, water—as well as broader tussles for geopolitical influence. Rivalries between these countries manifest in proxy struggles. In Sudan, the U.A.E., despite its denials, appears to have supported the R.S.F. with arms and funding, while the Saudis, Egyptians, and Qataris are far closer to the SAF; in Somalia proper, Turkey has a substantial military footprint, which eventually could be countered by the deployment of Israeli and Emirati assets in Somaliland. (At an event last month, in New York City, Somaliland’s President, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, told me that, despite the speculation, there was no Israeli military presence in his republic “at the moment.”) “The Horn has become this dysfunctional part of the fractured politics of the Middle East,” Alex Rondos, a former European Union special representative for the region, told me, adding that the fighting in Ethiopia “means we have a fusion, a convergence into something wider and more dangerous.” Michelle Gavin, a former U.S. diplomat and National Security Council senior director for Africa during the Obama Administration, sees a series of fractious conflicts that seem to be coalescing into one. “I start to sound like somebody with a lot of red string, but there are so many points of tension that have now become connected to other points of tension, that it feels like it would be very easy for escalation in one place to trigger escalation throughout the region,” Gavin said.

Processes exist to prevent a conflagration, but they don’t seem to be working. In Sudan, various groupings of foreign powers—the “Quad” of the United States, U.A.E., Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and the “Quintet” of five international bureaucracies, including the African Union and the E.U.—have been unable to stop a civil war that’s now in its fourth year, having displaced about a third of its population and left more than two-thirds of it in need of humanitarian relief. (A joint call from humanitarian organizations published Monday warned that aid shortfalls and continued fighting are putting this year’s harvest at risk in Sudan, an outcome that will likely worsen what’s already the world’s worst hunger crisis.) Some of the Middle Eastern countries still maintain interests that are driving the conflict, while other outside actors don’t seem able to muster the leverage to persuade warring parties to cease hostilities. The latter group includes the United States—the Trump Administration has gone through the motions of claiming that it wants to end the Sudanese conflict and has pursued rounds of talks, but analysts say that its engagement has been, at best, superficial and insufficient. The Biden Administration helped facilitate the end of the Tigray conflict in 2022, but its successor “has picked a side” in Ethiopia, Cameron Hudson, who served as director for African affairs in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, wrote in Semafor, pointing to the prioritization of major commercial sales of U.S. aircraft to Ethiopia and the Trump Administration’s sanctioning of a number of Tigrayan officials earlier this year.

Washington was “treated in this region as the ultimate sort of traffic cop,” Alex Rondos told me, but now it is “operationally AWOL,” and that has created “a sense of impunity” among many other governments. In a policy brief he wrote earlier this year, Rondos described two emerging camps in the Horn of Africa. “One claims to defend the territorial sovereignty of existing states,” he explained, anticipating the sort of rhetoric articulated by the Egyptian, Eritrean, and Somali leaders this past weekend, and also by their backers in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But that sits against the interests of governments in Ethiopia, the U.A.E., and even Israel, countries that seek “control over strategic corridors, resources, and supply chains rather than traditional definitions of territorial authority.” The Trump Administration seems, in instinct and politics, inclined toward the second camp. Somaliland’s Abdullahi, aware that this may be his best chance, has actively lobbied the White House for recognition of the country with offers of potentially renaming a major airport after President Trump and facilitating the construction of a Trump Tower in Hargeisa, Somaliland’s putative capital. The cynical deal-making of foreign powers and the proliferating violence it stokes are symptoms of the new geopolitics, Gavin, who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “This kind of ‘money talks’ approach, the utter failure of multilateral institutions to engage in the kind of preventive diplomacy that staves off conflict, the proxy warfare where you compete for influence by spilling African blood—it is an incredibly disheartening display of where we’re at.” ♦

The Walter Smittle III Regional Responder Training Center sits at the end of a gravel road on a ridge just south of Ripley, West Virginia, in Jackson County. On a muggy morning this past August, I toured the building with Ross Mellinger, the county sheriff, a tall, bearded man with a tattoo of an elk on his right forearm. He showed me inside, where there’s a gym, an office, and two large classrooms, which host seminars for police officers and E.M.T.s. Lining the classroom walls are framed photos of arrests and drug busts, alongside mug shots and pictures of E.M.T.s at crash sites. “Our décor,” Mellinger called it. One photo showed deputies posing in front of stacks of confiscated cash. Outside one classroom was a photo of the last public hanging in West Virginia, which took place in Ripley, in 1897. The hanged man, John Morgan, had been jailed, tried for murder, and convicted, before escaping jail, getting apprehended, and being executed—all in ten days, Mellinger said. (It was closer to a month.) “Talk about efficient justice,” Mellinger added. “Now you can’t get a warrant in ten days.”

The training center, along with a nearby shooting range, was built in 2024. The shooting range was paid for with money the state had received from a series of settlements with companies involved in the manufacture and distribution of prescription opioids. These companies—including Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, CVS, Cardinal Health, and others—agreed to pay around fifty billion dollars to all fifty states, and the District of Columbia, starting in 2022 until the late twenty-thirties. West Virginia, vulnerable to the flood of pain pills in the late nineties and early two-thousands because of the state’s high rates of disability and poverty, has a higher rate of overdose deaths than any state in the country. It was promised a billion dollars, the most money per capita of any state. The first allotment given to Jackson County, in 2024, was just under six hundred thousand dollars. Mellinger petitioned the county commission to allocate about half of that money to the shooting range, and the commission unanimously agreed; later, it earmarked another two hundred thousand dollars for the training center.

Teresa Evans, who was born and raised in Jackson County, was a court reporter during West Virginia’s trial against opioid manufacturers. “I saw what terrible things were done by the opioid companies to manipulate and addict people,” she told me. Shortly after Jackson County decided to use its settlement money on the shooting range and the training center, she began questioning that decision at public meetings. Couldn’t the funds be better spent on rehab centers or recovery groups? “Do you see how lopsided this all seems?” she said at a meeting in the spring of 2024.

Evans was joined at some of those meetings by Kelly Boggess DeWees, whom she’d met at church more than a decade before. DeWees volunteered as an advocate for children whose parents had been accused of neglect or abuse. Her two children were both addicted to opioids; DeWees had been the primary caretaker for seven of her grandchildren, and legally adopted three of them. After navigating the morass of family law herself, she began guiding other would-be guardians. Evans admired her fervor, and the two women became fast friends. “We have the same heart,” DeWees said. But they have different styles. When I spoke to them about the commission’s spending decisions, Evans was diplomatic. “I just felt like the money had been so hard-fought to get that it should have gone for something opioid-related, not all law enforcement,” she said. DeWees quipped, “They’re just up there trying to shoot better so they can kill addicts.”

The shooting range, a square of recycled turf about half the size of a football field, with a concrete wall at one end, cost two hundred and seventy thousand dollars to build. Mellinger told me it’s used about a dozen times a year, and that the training center is used several times a month. As we walked around the place, he pitched me on the complex’s usefulness in the fight against opioid addiction. “If you get into a treatment facility here, it’s because you probably got arrested or you overdosed,” he said. “So we have to be more effective at doing our jobs before the treatment facilities ever get a crack at them.” In his view, “this was the best, most responsible investment that you could have with the available funds for the purpose of bettering the community. It’s a no-brainer.”

People often call money from the opioid settlement “blood money,” and you might expect that it would go mostly to the families of people who died of overdoses. But the payouts have been structured to treat states and communities as the harmed parties, with the idea that the opioid epidemic is a public-health crisis more than it is a collection of individual tragedies.

There’s a precedent for this: the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which was signed in 1998, similarly treated the damage done by cigarette campaigns as financial harm to states, which footed the Medicaid bills of smokers. In that settlement, tobacco companies agreed to pay states two hundred and six billion dollars, and that money came with almost no restrictions. None of it was earmarked for smokers or their families, and ultimately less than five per cent of it went to fund smoking prevention. To avoid a similar outcome, the opioid-settlement money was framed as a means to abate the “public nuisance” of the opioid epidemic; eighty-five per cent of the money must be spent directly on opioid remediation. An appendix to the settlement lays out approved uses for the money, including medication-assisted treatment, syringe-service programs, broad assistance for people in recovery programs, and education of law-enforcement officers “regarding appropriate practices and precautions when dealing with fentanyl or other drugs.” Anything not spent on such remediation must be reported publicly.

In West Virginia, the settlement funds are set to be released in portions across a period of eighteen years. Three-quarters of the money—eventually, seven hundred million dollars—will be given to a state-run nonprofit, the West Virginia First Foundation. (It has received three hundred and eighty million dollars so far.) The organization, which took more than a year and a half to be set up, plans to put the settlement in a fund to earn interest in perpetuity, so that the state doesn’t “commit intergenerational theft,” as the foundation’s director, Jonathan Board, told me. The foundation began spending the interest in February, 2025, two years after it started to come in, and disbursed eleven million dollars in that first year. In 2026, it has spent twenty million dollars, helping to fund youth and foster-care programs, a forty-eight bed “recovery village” in Berkeley County that provides comprehensive care for addicts, and a crisis-response unit, embedded in the police department, in the city of Wheeling.

Jonathan Stoltman, who runs the Opioid Policy Institute, a nonprofit watchdog, has been tracking the spending of opioid-settlement money across the country since the funds were first released, in 2022. “The money is generally moving too slow, and we’re actively in crisis,” he told me. In Michigan, where Stoltman lives, fifty per cent of the money is destined for local governments; a report released by the state’s attorney general earlier this year showed that, as of December 2025, eighty per cent of that money had not yet been spent. Billions of dollars have been disbursed nationwide, but it is “impossible” to track it all, according to Christine Minhee, who runs a national database, the Opioid Settlement Tracker. Minhee told me that public-reporting requirements vary state to state on the eighty-five per cent of the settlement that must be spent on opioid abatement. “The reporting that does exist can be amazing, but it’ll just be one piece of a fifty-state puzzle, and the rest of the pieces can be blurry,” Minhee said. Tracie M. Gardner, the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, noted that some municipalities have used settlement money to pay for existing programs and pulled the original funding to pay for non-opioid-related considerations—a process called supplantation. Supplantation is only explicitly restricted in some states, but, even where it is, enforcement can lag far behind spending decisions. “By the time we figure out the monitoring component, it will be done,” Gardner said.

But perhaps the most pressing problem, in Stoltman’s view, is that “there’s not enough guidance to help local decision-makers.” In 2023 and 2024, the city of Irvington, in New Jersey, spent more than six hundred thousand dollars of its settlement money on “opioid awareness” events that included large concerts. (The township has defended that decision.) More typically, municipalities have spent the money on law enforcement. In 2025, Amherst County, Virginia, approved spending seventy-five thousand dollars on police drones; Kane County, Illinois, earmarked more than a million dollars on a forensics lab. In May, Mississippi Today reported that the city of Gulfport had allocated two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of its settlement funds to police surveillance. That same month, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars were used in Trumbull County, Ohio, for new police vehicles. Many millions across the country have been spent covering jail costs.

In West Virginia, in 2024 and 2025, local governments spent nearly half of their allotment on general law-enforcement expenses. Patrick Morrisey, the governor, who led the state’s prosecution against opioid distributors and manufacturers as attorney general, has cited local governments’ “broad discretion” in their spending. The current attorney general, John McCuskey, recently announced that future opioid-related settlements will be distributed directly through the state legislature and local governments; those groups, McCuskey has said, “know best what their communities need.” In the past year, Cabell County spent four hundred thousand on hiring two new deputy sheriffs; Wood County spent a hundred and eighty thousand dollars on Tasers; Mason County spent a hundred and forty thousand on two police cruisers, fifty thousand on a new sheriff’s pickup, forty-four thousand on a virtual-reality firearms-training system, thirty thousand on Kevlar vests, and twenty thousand on “outfitting” for a Ford F-150. When I asked Board, the director of the West Virginia First Foundation, how to account for the divergence between his organization’s use of the funds and what these local governments were doing, he chalked it up to a “difference in interpretation.” Then he added, “You don’t tell another parent how to raise their kids.”

On the day that I toured the new training center in Ripley, I also attended a meeting at Teresa Evans and Kelly DeWees’s church. When I arrived, there were a handful of children running around outside; they brought me to the church basement, where DeWees had cooked a large meal—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, green beans—enough to feed three dozen people. The kids went back out to play, and DeWees, who’s referred to as Mama Kelly by the parishioners, leaned close to me. “Those are all survivors,” she whispered.

The meeting was for Breath of Life, a Christian recovery group formed by DeWees’s daughter-in-law, who is ten years sober, and her son, who is also in recovery. The basement, about the size of the gym in the police department’s new training center, soon filled up as people got off work. On one wall were photos of people in addiction juxtaposed with photos of the same individuals in recovery. On another wall were the twelve steps—more specifically, “The 12 Steps Through JESUS,” as the poster read. “We admit that (by myself, without JESUS) we are powerless over our addiction.”

DeWees has gone to the county three times with requests for money from the opioid settlement, for meals and ad-hoc support for Breath of Life members. The county has approved each request, totalling seventy thousand dollars—“probably because we dug in before,” DeWees told me. She said that the group has started holding a weekly meeting in Sissonville, a town about half an hour south, and that, if more money comes in, she’ll start an informal day care for the children of people in recovery, and maybe, eventually, open a recovery home. “That’s our aspiration,” she told me. “But it’s—” she cut herself off and waved at the air, as if dismissing the possibility.

Donna Coleman, the director of the BoMar Club, a drop-in center for people struggling with mental illness in the middle of Ripley, told me that it’s hard for organizations like hers, which support people in active addiction, to secure funding. The BoMar Club, which is based in a two-story Victorian house, offers broad services for addicts: transportation, food, help with benefit and job applications. When I visited, people came in and out, grabbing something from the kitchen, saying hi to Coleman and her employees, asking to use the printer. Coleman, who recently reached ten years sober, previously got help from the BoMar Club herself. What works for one person might not work for another, she noted. “If God was being shoved down my throat when I came here, I’d be dead,” she said. The BoMar Club has received just under thirty thousand dollars from the opioid settlement, to fix its roof and bolster outreach efforts, and Coleman was petitioning the commission for more money to redo the floor, which sagged under our feet. “I have to have other ways of getting funding,” she told me. I mentioned my conversation with Mellinger, who told me that the public needs to be educated about the role the police play in recovery. Coleman said, “Do you know how he educated me? He put handcuffs on me.”

At the Breath of Life meeting, which lasted an hour, each attendee thanked God for their sobriety. There were readings and personal confessions and it ended with the Serenity Prayer. Afterward, DeWees took me aside. She asked me about the police training center; she hadn’t seen the inside yet. I described it to her, and she shook her head, slightly, and then more emphatically. “When I see some of this crazy stuff, I want to go in there and ask them for eighty-eight thousand dollars, because everybody else is just asking for whatever,” she said. As she spoke, she seemed to convince herself that she would go to the commission and ask for a “rainy-day fund” at the next meeting. Her voice, which had started soft, got louder, then it grew soft again. “Eventually that money is going to run out,” she said, “and then where are we going to be?” ♦

In his desperate attempt to hold on to power as Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to cast a spell on the electorate with a stark and profoundly cynical message: Forget the horror of October 7, 2023, and my responsibility as the guardian of national security. (Blame everyone except me.) But celebrate me, elect me, for all that I have done to assert the military dominance of the state, on October 8th and thereafter. It is an outrageous argument. It is also one that could, against all odds, prevail.

The election is October 27th. Netanyahu and his party, Likud, are not ahead in most mainstream polls, and yet most observers of any credibility agree that damn near anything could happen, especially given Israel’s complicated parliamentary arrangements and wild array of parties. Netanyahu’s principal opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist former Army general and the leader of the Yashar Party, could end up forming a winning coalition with parties led by Yair Golan, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Lieberman, as well as a moderate Arab party called Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas. Or there could be a deadlock and yet another election next year. Or Netanyahu, who sometimes in his long career has been stronger in the final ballot than in the polls, could find a way to form, yet again, a right-wing coalition.

What is astonishing—politically, morally, strategically—is that Netanyahu has any chance at all. Within days of the Hamas attack on Israel, the worst disaster in the history of the state, it was all but a given that he would soon be out of power. How could any electorate look past such a collapse and national trauma? For a while, Benny Gantz, a well-known former Army general who is seen as a Gary Cooper-like centrist, was the presumed favorite—but it turned out that he had very little to say and even less charisma with which to say it. As a presumptive Prime Minister, he proved no more durable than a wedding cake left out in the rain. Gantz quickly became the forgotten man of Israeli politics.

More recently, Eisenkot has emerged as a figure of solidity and a focus of sympathy. (He lost a son and two nephews in the war. Everyone knows this about him.) When he became the potential leader of a putative opposition coalition, Netanyahu made it clear how he would set out to attack him. He would declare his opponent soft on security, soft on the Arabs, and (God forbid) a supporter of finding a path toward peace with the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. A blend of bravado and bigotry has worked for Netanyahu in past campaigns.

But it is one thing to predict the ugliness of a campaign, and quite another to watch it play out. Earlier this week, Yinon Magal, the leading talk-show host and commentator on Channel 14, an ardently pro-Netanyahu outlet, denounced a group of former hostages and their families who contributed to a book called “Mr. Abandonment: The Legacy of the Man Who Abandoned the Hostages.” Their argument was that the Prime Minister had failed to make freeing the hostages his main priority. Magal did not hesitate to smear them. “Anyone who took part in the campaign saying he abandoned the hostages will be remembered in infamy, on a pillar of shame,” Magal said during a radio broadcast. The hostages and family members who dared to criticize Netanyahu for his handling of the issue, he said, are “the lowest people living in the State of Israel.”

Eisenkot, who joined a war cabinet at Netanyahu’s invitation, quit that council when he determined that Netanyahu was refusing to make the hostages his first priority. Magal, who welcomes Netanyahu onto his show “The Patriots” with the audience singing praises to him as the “King of Israel,” spit venom at those who dared to criticize the Prime Minister. “I’m telling you,” Magal said of the former hostages and their families, “these are despicable people, and the only thing that can absolve them is if they put the Likud ballot slip for Netanyahu into the ballot box in the election. ‘Forgive us, absolve us, pardon us.’ That’s the only way they can atone for the abomination they committed by participating in ‘Mr. Abandonment.’ ”

Netanyahu’s critics have often pointed out that, even in the early days of the war, he rarely visited the hostage families or expressed much concern for them. That omission, that coldness, has not been forgotten. At a ceremony Monday, in Jerusalem, commemorating the October 7th massacre, a bereaved father, whose son was killed at one of the kibbutzim near Gaza, rose during Netanyahu’s speech and said, for all to hear, “You did not protect my son. You did not protect the twelve hundred people who were murdered in a single day, on October 7th. Shame on you, disgrace.”

At the same ceremony, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, called for an investigation into the security collapse. “No amount of time that passes can allow us to forgo this obligation. There are clear lessons we already know we must internalize: We must not ignore warnings or worrying signs.”

This is the very same message that has come from Eisenkot and so many of Netanyahu’s opponents. For three years, the opposition has demanded that Netanyahu do what the Israeli government did in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, despite warnings from various sources in the security establishment. That exhaustive investigation, the Agranat Commission, led to numerous resignations and, eventually, the end of Golda Meir’s career as Prime Minister. By contrast, Netanyahu and his circle have done all they can to defer any kind of official inquiry and, at the same time, to put out the word that everyone but the Prime Minister is to blame. Leading figures in the security establishment have issued public apologies and left the scene. Netanyahu remains.

It has been well known for a long time that Netanyahu badly misread the intentions and capabilities of Hamas, treating them as little more than a hyped-up street gang compared to Hezbollah, in Lebanon. His singular focus has always been on Iran. Over time, there has been a wealth of investigative journalism making plain that the security establishment ignored clear warnings of peril from mid-level intelligence officers and other sources. No less startling, Netanyahu himself got clear warnings from both the United Arab Emirates and Egypt that a major operation was imminent. Reporters for Haaretz wrote last month that Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the President of the U.A.E., told Netanyahu in late September that he had reliable intelligence about Hamas and its plans to attack Israel. (Netanyahu has denied the report and similar ones about warnings from Egyptian sources.)

In Trumpian fashion, Netanyahu and his circle have gone on the counterattack. The Prime Minister’s wife, who is known for treating aides and household help with high-volume contempt, even gave an interview recently that fed into widespread right-wing conspiracy theories that high-ranking Israeli security officials had inside information on Hamas’s plans. Speaking to Channel 14, Sara Netanyahu insinuated that Yair Golan, the former deputy chief of staff of the Army and leader of the center-left Democrats Party, drove south on the morning of the attack to rescue people, not because he was courageous or selfless but because he had advance knowledge of the Hamas assault.

“When you’re a military man of such high rank, claiming that you fought on October 7th, already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the Prime Minister,” she said.

Netanyahu generally tries to distance himself from conspiracy theories, leaving that work to his supporters and family members. In the meantime, he has focussed on highlighting criticism from abroad as a badge of honor. In his recent appearance at the United Nations, Netanyahu was speaking not so much to the scattered delegates in the room but to the cameras and his electoral base at home. According to Reuters, Netanyahu’s team posted the speech online, with the Hebrew caption “Netanyahu takes on the world.” His self-depiction is as the Churchillian defender of the nation.

Just as Netanyahu refuses to take any responsibility for the cataclysm of October 7th, he insists that his military campaigns against Gaza, where more than seventy thousand have died; against Hezbollah, in Lebanon; and against Iran have made Israel stronger—and to hell with his foreign critics, whom he often paints as antisemitic. The new documentary film “NAZA,” which focusses on war crimes in Gaza, and the foiled hijacking of the FlyDubai flight have all become fodder for his political campaign. He will do and say anything to deflect attention from his failures or his readiness to accommodate the haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, who insist on avoiding mandatory military service. As Ilana Dayan, an investigative journalist and the host of “Uvda,” on Channel 12, put it to me, “The vast majority of those who are for Bibi tell you ‘There is no one else but him,’ and that he is showing the world how strong we are. That is one of the pathologies of this political campaign.”

Eisenkot, who entered politics in 2022, insists that the choice in this election is “between responsibility and running away from responsibility.” When I interviewed him recently, in Israel, he told me that among his most immediate priorities as a national leader would be the establishment of an official commission of inquiry, one that would investigate, among other questions, Netanyahu’s culpability. More recently, he has argued that the Prime Minister is an “anti-leader,” who dodges responsibility and thirsts for credit he has not earned. “The FlyDubai plane incident is an excellent example,” he told the Times of Israel this week. “He takes an incident that constitutes a massive security failure, which was averted only thanks to the extraordinary heroism of Israeli civilians and an Indian pilot, and shamelessly leverages it for a photo op.”

Eisenkot went on, “I look at the polls and I am convinced that in 21 days, Netanyahu will no longer be prime minister of Israel. It makes no sense for a man who failed in the greatest failure since the establishment of the state, who for three years failed to achieve either the war aims or any of the goals he presented in the Knesset, to continue ruling through a cynical policy of divide and rule and a culture of lies.” ♦